About 15 years ago, Esquire magazine did an interesting thing a few times.

It republished landmark articles as detachable booklets inside the issues.

One of them was “What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?” 

The article originally appeared in Esquire magazine back in the 1980s. I ran across it again in recent weeks.

In an earlier issue, Esquire included a pull-out booklet of what it considered the magazine’s “Greatest Story Ever Told,” which was “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold” by Gay Talese. 

The article was so well-written, contained in a booklet of its own, and long enough to be a novella. For that edition, Esquire noted that the Frank Sinatra story just squeaked by the Ted Williams story. 

Esquire has printed the story on Williams under the heading “The Greatest Sports Story Ever Told.” Like the Sinatra piece, this article is long enough and good enough to deserve it being brought to the attention of readers and sports fans. 

Ted Williams was one of baseball’s greatest players as well as a member of the Red Sox bullpen. But for all of the years he played, for all of the records he broke and set, Williams’ Sox only made one World Series appearance and they lost. 

Cramer’s piece touches upon this as well as numerous other points in Williams’ colorful career, life and personality. Cramer performs a remarkable feat of presenting a sports legend as both the old man of the 1980s and the young man who became a controversial icon of the 1940s and ’50s. 

Cramer delves into the mystique that was Ted Williams, in a style that is simultaneously insightful, brash and places the reader squarely in the older Ted Williams’ living room, his middle-aged fishing boats and the young Williams’ baseball diamonds where he raged and upstaged. 

“What Do You Think Of Ted Williams Now?” is an incredible volume of remarkable sports writing as well as just plain remarkable reporting. It shows the power of the lengthy magazine article, which is all the more interesting since this, what Esquire believes is its second greatest story ever, was almost cut in the 1980s by more than 2,000 words prior to its original publication. 

Cramer, however, believed so strongly in his original piece that he boldly entered the magazine’s offices after the bigwig editors had left for the day, only hours before the issue went to press, and convinced the layout people that the editors changed their minds again and wanted the story’s original version instead. 

“None of this was true, of course,” an introduction notes, “but the man had won the Pulitzer Prize; who was going to tell him no?” 

Luckily, Cramer’s bold gamble worked and his original version went to press. This must have been a tremendous story when it first saw print and nearly 40 years haven’t diminished its power.